Bug 497239

Sorry, what's the issue here? As you discovered, Firefox triggers its mode when animations are globally disabled. For a person who suffers from issues with animations, why isn't disabling animations entirely in the manner you found the correct solution?

It is a preference for reduced motion, not disabled animations.

Plasma should have an option to set reduced motion preference without forcing animations to be disabled.

What does reduces motion actually mean though? What's the expectation for what that should do? This seems like a very nebulous description.

> This seems like a very nebulous description.

Nothing wrong with making it more friendly and/or more clear!

As my proposal here is to *ONLY* add a toggle for user preference applications to read from - and no rework of any animations is proposed - I simply desire an accessibility toggle - the toggle can simply be called:
"Let applications know you prefer reduced animation motion", 

With a tooltip saying:
"Applications can use this to decide if to reduce animation motion, to help people with sensitivity to moving elements"

> What does reduces motion actually mean though? 

See the linked document above - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion - which also links to another document within.

They are not exhaustive documents of issues one could suffer from that require special care with animations, but it should give you an idea why it is needed.

If a real example that affects me *personally* will help you any, having a large, zooming/unzooming/rotating image preview is enough to make me want to throw up at times, **even if it is dog slow**. 

Thankfully. it happens rarely to me, but not everyone is as lucky.

>  What's the expectation for what that should do?

If this is asking about how to change existing KDE animations - this is not part of this proposal, nor is KDE bad with animations, they are rather fine in general.
You are still welcome to read some about it in the linked resources, though!

If this is asking about what I desire to resolve in this report - add a toggle to allow applications to take user preference into account.

Hopefully I gave exhaustive enough information this time around.

Thanks, that makes sense now. I think what we have right now is fine. If animations — even slow ones — make you want to throw up, the clear solution is to disable them, which is what we already have the ability to do, and other apps are free to read this setting to turn on their own "reduced motion" setting.

Of course, the fact that apps have to read our KDE-specific setting and GNOME's GNOME-specific setting is not ideal. The solution there is for someone to add an XDG spec for this, and then encourage DEs and apps to support it, or even submit patches for them to do so.

However in the absence of that, I'm afraid what we have will have to suffice.

> the clear solution is to disable them (all)

As repeatedly explained above, disabling all animations is not the same as motion reduction. 

It is just not.

See another example in the form of iOS implementation: 
  "Reduce Motion: When off, more items in the user interface animate, such as the parallax effect of icons."
  https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph0b691d3ed/ios

  "Screen transitions and effects use the dissolve effect instead of zoom or slide effects."
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/111781

> I think what we have right now is fine

Reduced motion is an accessibility accommodation that not everyone requires. It should be possible to make applications and websites behave better in regards to motion without having to work-around it by disabling animations completely.

"Sucks to be you, works fine for me as is" is not a valid reason to close such a request.

> the fact that apps have to read our KDE-specific setting and GNOME's GNOME-specific setting is not ideal

I am not asking for something that requires adding an XDG spec, I am not asking for some new concept, I am asking for an accessibility toggle that every operating system has, and every system (sans Android, for now) uses such the toggle exactly as I am describing, not only a "disable everything or bust" approach.

It is available everywhere, it just sucks on Plasma, as animations have to be force-disabled to use it.

Closing an accessibility request as "works for me" feels done in bad taste at best, and I would appreciate if someone else had a look at this ticket before relegating it as WORKSFORME/NEEDSINFO again.

As I understand it, you're asking for two things:
1. A standard "reduce motion" setting that apps can look at
2. ...which also, when used, makes animations throughout KDE software that use motion instead cross-fade or fade out

Is that right?

Just the "reduce motion" toggle.

The cross-fade was just an example of what the an application may do with the setting.

Thanks.

The challenge is that if we create this, every app in the universe will have to begin the process of porting to respect it. Apps often don't want to do this unless the setting is governed by some kind of cross-desktop spec to prevent it from changing — which is precisely what you're proposing. :) Firefox found an existing setting to key off of, and if we add a new one, they'll have to start using that one. This is why I was saying it would probably be best if we get an XDG spec to govern it.